Midland Theater, Kansas City

April 2, 2013

Let me explain a little something about my co-host, co-ninja,
co-concert attender Peterman Pedro Inteligente Smart. He likes to exaggerate. Well,
I can’t honestly say he LIKES it, but he DOES it. A lot. And by a lot I’m
talking both frequency and severity. In fact, his hyperbolizing became so
frequent and disruptive a number of years ago, I was forced to develop an arithmetic
system to help me understand the size and scope of some of his claims. It’s
called the Pete Rule of Ten.

Here’s how it works... You take the Claim of Pete (Cp),
determine if the direction of the exaggeration is down (D), i.e. “I could
still 360 dunk a year ago,” in which case you multiply by 10 (answer: he could
do that dunk 10 years ago), or if the direction is up (U), i.e. “This is my
favorite album in the past 20 years,” in which you divide by 10 (answer:
favorite album in the past 2 years). A flow chart would probably be the best
pictorial representation of how it all shakes out, but as an equation it would
look something like this:

There is a reason I’ve explained this phenomenon, and it
relates to the Alt-J show at the Midland Theater on 4/2/13. Roughly 6 or 7
songs into the set on this fine Kansas City night, after I had decided I was
becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Thom Green (Alt-J drummer), Mr. Inteligente
leans over to me and states: “He’s my favorite drummer of the past 10 years.” At
that precise moment, like a flashcard from 6th grade, this image
pops into my mind: Cp / 10 = T. My math
teacher was right! I would use equations in everyday life!

Now that I’ve taken you on a small journey that (if my math
is correct) brought us directly to the truth (T) of how Peterman felt about the
drummer of this band (favorite in the past one
year), I will say that’s still a significant statement. We see a decent amount
of live shows. We trade live performance videos via email like Garbage Pail
Kids (…aaaaand dated myself). Also, we try our best to avoid the suck shows and
suck videos of suck musicians playing suck drums. As a result, any statement
placing any musician in that kind of “favorites” category means they are pretty
damn unbad at what they’re doing.

This was no exception. Dude was pretty legit. Part of it had
to do with the fact that the other 3 members of the band were essentially
backlit for the majority of the show and he was not, but I think my eyes would
have been drawn to his abilities regardless of the stage lighting setup.

Before I go any further, here is the setlist:

Interlude 1

Tessellate

Something Good

Buffalo

Dissolve Me

Fitzpleasure

Slow Dre
(Kylie Minogue
cover)

Matilda

Interlude 2

Bloodflood

Ms

Breezeblocks

Encore:

Hand-Made

A real Hero
(College cover)

Taro

Seeing a band tour after their first album is kind of a
special thing. You can pretty much rest assured you’re going to hear the entire
album, and if you’re lucky, a cover or two. This particular show was not an
exception to that general axiom. However, the cover is typically not the
highlight of the night. Strangely (because I loved this album so much), on this
night I think it was. “Slow Dre,” the Kylie Minogue/Dr. Dre hybrid cover was a
confusing, and honestly just flat groovy little surprise jam that I’d never
heard before Tuesday night. Now that I’ve researched it and heard the different
versions floating around the www, I’m slightly embarrassed I didn’t recognize
the “Still Dre” part of the groove when I first heard it, but I will take a
little hipster solace in the fact that I kept telling the people around me it
was straight hip-hop before I actually knew it was, well, almost straight hip
hop. Here’s a decent version of it:

Other than that little curveball and the song “Buffalo”,
they played essentially the entire album, An
Awesome Wave. They kicked it all off
with the first three tracks of the album in succession, which I would guess
upset absolutely nobody. The stage setup was fairly straightforward with
decently elaborate lighting, considering this was their first major tour.

The theater was sold out (3,000ish people), and I was told
before the show that for some reason they’ve hit it bigger here (KC) than in any
other U.S. city. This was their second show here in the past 4 months, and
judging by the crowd energy, that wasn’t too many. Overall, if you were a fan
of their first album, you had to be a fan of this show. If you went in looking
for that transformative moment that can happen at a concert that just levels
you to your own mind floor, I’m not sure you got it. There were no moments that
were much more powerful live than they are on the album. There weren’t many
meanderings, added solos, added pauses, primal screams, or slap your own mama
in the mouth instances. But that’s okay. Those moments are typically grown on
the road. They develop. They are both spontaneous and cultivated, and this is a
band in its infancy.

The fact that they’re relatively green in the touring game, combined
with the fact that their overall sound is pretty much unlike anything else out
there right now, equals the potential for a pretty terrible live experience.
The music itself is complex and I would guess challenging to pull off live, and
Joe Newman (lead singer) has a voice that is, how should I say, 1 part Kermit,
2 Parts Brett Dennen, and maybe another 1 or 2 parts “is that autotune or his
actual voice?” Those are ingredients for a show that is potentially squirming-in-your-seat
uncomfortable to watch. But it wasn’t at all. It’s like they took hot sauce and
vodka and salt and a mango and made a delicious cupcake out of it.